July 11, 2012

How Frank Lloyd Wright resolved his inner struggles; small but thoughtful gallery exhibit details architect's early vital years in Chicago

Long before Frank Lloyd Wright became a professional great man who costumed himself in a porkpie hat and a flowing cape, he signed his drawings “Frank L. Wright” and carried out such humble tasks as preparing drawings of buildings for real estate ads in the Chicago Tribune.

His mentor and lieber Meister, acclaimed architect Louis Sullivan, would scold Wright for using drafting tools to create a strongly geometric ornament. Sullivan preferred the spontaneous freehand sketch, the better to create ornament in which squares and circles would flow directly into an organic swirl of leaf forms.

“Make it live,” he would urge his young charge.

These are among the vivid details of a small but thoughtful and altogether delightful exhibition about Wright's early years in Chicago, which came at the end of the 19th century. Rather than a mere prelude to such later triumphs as the cantilevered Fallingwater House in southwestern Pennsylvania, the show argues (mostly persuasively) that these years produced seeds which would later flower into greatness.

The exhibition, “Wright's Roots,” has been curated by Chicago's cultural historian, Tim Samuelson. A former staff member of Chicago's landmarks commission and a walking encyclopedia of the city's history, Samuelson has a knack for making the past seem as fresh as the latest Twitter post.

Two years ago, he organized a spectacular exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, “Louis Sullivan's Idea,” which powerfully revealed one of Sullivan's core concepts: That the architect should imbue the inert materials of steel and stone with the vibrant force of nature. Blowing up photos of the architect's buildings to massive scale and displaying his extraordinary collection of architectural fragments, many of which were obtained as wrecking crews tore down Sullivan's buildings, Samuelson made viewers feel like they were right on the sidewalk, experiencing Sullivan's building's firsthand. They even were free to touch the ornament, a form of behavior that might get them kicked out of the Art Institute.

The new show, which appears across the street from the Cultural Center at the city-run Expo 72 gallery, follows the same winning approach.

It charts the years from 1887, when the aspiring architect (just 19) left his independent-thinking family in Wisconsin, to 1897, four years after Wright broke with Sullivan, when he entered a new phase of aesthetic maturity and began using his memorable three-part name. The decoration on display (above) is dazzling. But it would be mere eye candy without Samuelson's clear-as-a-bell wall text and an exhibition design by architect John Vinci that cleverly picks up on the gallery's angled walls to carve out comfortable niches of viewing space. (Artist Chris Ware helped design and arrange the text panels.)

Throughout, Samuelson excels at the art of juxtaposition, as in the deliberately loaded pairing with which the show begins. We see, side-by-side, what is widely considered Wright's first great Prairie Style home, the 1902 Ward Willits House in north suburban Highland Park, and an unbuilt beaux-arts (yes, beaux-arts) 1893 competition design for a combined public library and museum in Milwaukee (left). Anyone familiar with Wright's later expression of disdain for the classically inspired architecture of Chicago's 1893 world's fair is bound to exclaim: “This is Frank Lloyd Wright?”

The drawing foreshadows one of the show's key themes: That Wright had to resolve inner struggles between tradition and modernity, the classical past and the machine aged-present, before he could arrive at his precedent-shattering Prairie homes, with their freely organized floor plans, ground-hugging horizontal lines, and smooth surfaces free of Victorian bric-a-brac. Like other geniuses — Picasso comes to mind — he didn't so much discard tradition as he incorporated it into his own transcendent vision.

The show's other big idea, that Wright's formative years in Chicago led to his later triumphs, is also expressed through side-by-side pairings and is, for the most part, compelling. The stairs that revolved around the sky lit well of the sharply-gabled, 1894 Roloson Row Houses at 3213-19 S. Calumet Ave. (left) are imaginatively portrayed as anticipating the vertical movement up and down the spiraling ramps of Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

While other pairings gild the lily, ascribing more weight to Wright's Chicago buildings than they deserve, they are still a visual delight. Among them: a sequence that showcases Sullivan's now-demolished Schiller Building skyscraper at 64 W. Randolph St. alongside an oversize rendering of Wright's 1956 plan for a mile-high Chicago skyscraper and an old photo of two Chicago icons — a wily Wright showing the mile-high plan to a smiling Mayor Richard J. Daley (below). The architect died in 1959.

To be sure, there are faults. The wall text cloyingly refers to Wright as “Frank” and it's marred by the occasional missing word or excess verbiage that is sloppily covered. Wright's recent biographers — Brendan Gill, Meryle Secrest and Ada Louise Huxtable — have covered these years in greater detail and with more piercing insight into the myriad deceptions with which the architect constructed his public image.

But in contrast to these East Coast authors, Samuelson brings something special to the game: A local's intensive knowledge of these buildings and their broader significance in the arc of Wright's career. Yes, there have been an endless string of Wright exhibitions in recent years. This one, however, is well worth your time.